Cheeky Shadow Priest Nerf?

[Deleted]

So, I'd like to hear from some of my fellow shadow priests. Have anyone else experienced a vast dps drop post-4.3?
I'm aware of the 10% mind blast damage nerf on the T12 4 set, but going from 28k on HC Ragnaros to 22k seems a bit drastic. Same goes for dummy dps: Dps has dropped by 1.5k after 4.3 was implemented.

[Kassina]

I've only done one DS raid and on a new boss with new tactics so haven't felt much, will see next week if I feel a little nerf

[Deleted]

My dps seems better ><

[Deleted]

Feels like I have lost ~10% damage compared to FL (legendary + 4set nerf). Anyone checked how nerf it should be in theory? Also gotta remember melee has now +10%AP so comparatively your own position compared to them is worse, even though dps could be same.

[Deleted]

Pulled 34k this week, pulled 35k last week - on raggy hc

I did feel a little bit nerfed (I played better this week) but I think the biggest difference was not being top of the meters by miles, rogues were seriously close and most other melee catching up. All of the phases were shorter. I got one less AA in p1. we pushed one less seeds in p2 (less AoE). We pushed 1 meteor easily and p4 was silly short. I managed to get 2 less AA than before + the lost AoE dps. combined with the legendary nerf and 4set I don't think its that surprising. Definitely having melee pushing so much more damage made me feel like I was doing less.
I probably gained a bit of DPS in p4 due to just standing in frosttrap and nuking (lol), although we got less trap uptime on raggy.

Not a big enough sample size to really say but nothing that concerned me that much.

[Kilee25]

I have the legendary + 4-piece bonus, and saw a loss of 2k dps in total. I was doing about 35k before and am at 33k now. In Dragon Soul, all of the melee are within 2000 dps of me and climbing. The rogues in particular (pre-dagger), are alreayd occasionally beating me.

Although I couldn't prove anything without working for blizzard and being on their dev team, it's my belief that the melee buff and legendary nerf had nothing to do with melee doing less damage because of having to move. I believe that Blizzard balanced melee and the legendary around each other so that guilds didn't drop melee from their raid group.

Anyway long story short I lost about 2k dps and the melee seem to have gained about 5k+ dps. The casters who don't have legendaries were firmly behind the melee in Dragon Soul, which seems highly suspicious to me. Melee didn't need help imo... Bliz just didn't want world first guilds combining to form raids with 17 casters with legendaries.

[dabros]

just get that new caster trinket, enjoy your 30% damage increase

[Arlee]

Wasn't there some buff to melee in general with this patch?

[Kilee25]

Yep, that's what I was talking about. They got a 10% increase in damage in dragon soul. The official reason was that Melee has a "handicap" because they have to run to targets in order to dps them.

[Garnier Fructis]

Yep, that's what I was talking about. They got a 10% increase in damage in dragon soul. The official reason was that Melee has a "handicap" because they have to run to targets in order to dps them.

I thought it was just a 10% increase to attack power, which is still substantial but not as big as 10% damage.

[Deleted]

Our rogues seem to have gotten about +3k, 31k->34k and that includes them having better weapons too (397 legendary first phase). So in reality melee maybe gets like 1-2k in from that AP buff? Though guess it depends lot which class melee is.

[Deleted]

22k rag hc yesterday night, did 27 the week before, without legendary.

[Hesp]

The actual nerfs we've received bring us down by somewhere near 5% if you have the legendary staff. Your Rag dps was more than likely affected by a faster kill which resulted in your cd map being messed up by higher melee dps pushing faster phases, rather than due to actual damage nerfs. The week before the patch I did 36k on Rag and thought I could have improved my dps a bit with better cd timing in p4, and this week I did 36.5k and played nearly optimally, which would have been more than a 500 dps increase prior to the patch. Once you relearn where to use your cd's best, you will probably regain the lost dps; none of the nerfs would account for the 20%+ nerf you are seeing.

Good luck beating a fire mage this tier though...

[Kosic]

My friend linked me this

http://simulationcraft.org/430/Raid_T13H.html

I've never used Simcraft, so i don't know how correct it is with the data. Some people say they don't believe it, and others give a mixed feel on it. As i've never used it before, i can't really believe it too well.

But my friend had convinced me that there is a huge loss in shadow priests dps this content, and he convinced me to go back to my mage i dropped during FL to go shadow priest. I'm really hoping this isn't the end result for the shadow priest, because i really liked playing mine. But for progress raids, we are going to need classes that can hit high dps with ease.

[Kilee25]

The DPS projections in simcraft do not seem to match up with http://raidbots.com/dpsbot/

I digress that it is early however, and things might change.

Although if the projections turn out to be true, you have to laugh at balance druids right about now... :P

Also if you look at the simcaft details, DI was not turned on for shadowpriests (probably wasn't for druids either), and it's going to bump us up a little bit ont he chart.

I did notice however that all the casters in the simcraft evaluations had the legendary equiped. Hinky that even simcraft assumes that all casters will have it in 4.3. >_>

[Hesp]

My friend linked me this

http://simulationcraft.org/430/Raid_T13H.html

I've never used Simcraft, so i don't know how correct it is with the data. Some people say they don't believe it, and others give a mixed feel on it. As i've never used it before, i can't really believe it too well.

But my friend had convinced me that there is a huge loss in shadow priests dps this content, and he convinced me to go back to my mage i dropped during FL to go shadow priest. I'm really hoping this isn't the end result for the shadow priest, because i really liked playing mine. But for progress raids, we are going to need classes that can hit high dps with ease.

Simcraft is a mixed bag for shadowpriests. On one hand, it is very good for determining stat weights if you take a proper average of different sim scenarios. On the other hand, shadowpriests are poorly modeled in the list you just linked for a variety of reasons.

- Simcraft does not clip mf to cast higher priority spells.
- Simcraft does not refresh dots when significant buffs are gained
- Those standard overall spec rankings do not factor in Dark Intent

In addition to these faults with simcraft, shadowpriests excel on literally every DS fight due to our fantastic toolkit which gives us an advantage in every situation. Patchwerk sims are fun to look at, but with the stark exception of Ultraxion, they are fairly unrealistic to apply to every fight. That said, I imagine there is a good 4k dps worth of unrealized damage simcraft can not model for a Patchwerk-style fight, placing us fairly even with warlocks. Fire mages and Demo locks are pretty untouchable right now though, so don't really go crazy comparing yourself to them. If the WoL trend of fire mages being top spec on every fight continues, they will be nerfed accordingly, so I wouldn't jump specs too quickly.

[Height]

I'm still at the top of the DPS charts while raiding with melee (mainly warriors and rogues) behind me now mixed with a mage or two. I'm not really worried, and it seems like when i get bloodlust / haste buff i beat the shit out of them. I think we scale insanely well, but I could be wrong. I'm very sure shadow priest is still going to be fantastic in 4.3 and possibly even need a nerf by the end of it. We'll see though.

[Kosic]

@Hesp,

I'm glad you posted back, because I was really worried that I would have to go back to my mage. I really don't enjoy the mage much. But because I was lucky enough to get 3/5 T13 LFR in my first run. My friend tried to convince me that the shadow priest is right at the bottom of the list. As I've never used simcraft before, I just looked at the numbers without looking into the data.

As you pointed out there was no dark intent on the list. I took a small look, and from other guides I've read. Dark Intent is of equal to about 2k dps, for a shadow priest in T11 heroic gear. So on T13 level it would be worth more.

After texting my friend who is Gm of our small 10man guild. He said that's awesome, I can stay on my priest, because he knows how disappointed I've became seeing those numbers. Next time if he tries to convince me to do anything, I will make sure to try do some research into it further.

Edit;
After some thinking, I do feel more drawn to my mage over my priest. Mainly because of the 3/5 T13. With my guild we're doing a prio on tokens, tanks > healers > dps > offspec (healers into dps > dps into tanks > tanks into dps). So it would mean i would have to get pretty lucky again in DS LFR.
Also, we're having words on our lock at the moment, he isn't doing too well, and I think we're replacing him with a BM hunter, to bring in more dmg for our group. Making it more of a physical dmg group (frost dk for 4% physical dps, 3% raid dmg from BM hunter, 5% crit to target from fire mage, 5% raid crit from sub rogue, 20% ap from Kings, or ench shaman. Sunder armor from warrior. etc).

So my priest would loose the Dark Intent buff, reducing 2-3k dps from the charts of me. While on the mage i could live without it.

[healyg]

i didn't feel a heavy nerf on rag hc, doing around 30-31k after the nerf no legendary.

[Yvaelle]

My dps is lower certainly - because the nerf to our 4pc was pretty big - but we didn't lose 10% (or 5k for that matter) of our dps overnight with the patch. The nerf is palpable but not crippling, I'm still almost always the top dps in my guild (and a number of our dps, myself included - frequently rank globally on top WoL parses so its not like our rogue/mages etc are bad).